Thanks for responding!

I agree that it’s best for the lemmyverse.net if there are many big instances too.

Unfortunately, the concept of the fediverse isn’t as easy to understand. The average newcomer (who mostly just wants to consume content and occasionally participate) starts off by interacting within their instance, and it takes some time to figure out cross-instance communication (there are still posts about this on the nostupidquestions-type communities). For such users, landing on a small instance means they’ll poke around, think that “this forum is dead”, and never return.

Like reddit, having a large userbase on lemmyverse is important to keep the conversation interesting (see i.imgur.com/4tXHAO0.png). Reddit has provided lemmy with a huge shot at success by injecting a large number of users. But if I’m being honest, the conversation on the lemmyverse isn’t as diverse and engaging as it is on reddit yet. This isn’t self-sustaining yet. I can point to 2 pieces of evidence to support this:

1. Using Voat as a (imperfect) proxy - I don’t know if there are official stats of Voat, but the best dataset I’ve seen for Voat (ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/…/23395) has 16.2M comments in 2.3M submissions from 113k users. Voat was shut down for lack of funding, but even in its heyday it wasn’t exactly thriving - many people on Voat were united in their toxicity and it never really got going. Compare these numbers to the lemmyverse which has about 100k active users over the last 6 months. If the fediverse is to grow beyond “that niche forum for nerds”, this userbase isn’t enough.

2. It’s already clear that the number of active users is decreasing - since mid-July, the number of monthly active users has dropped from 70k to 50k. This is expected (bunch of redditors who joined in June, poked around and said hi and left), but it means if the lemmyverse wants to have any chance of succeeding long term, you can’t alienate new users now.

The approach I’ve been advocating since the beginning of lemmy is:

• if you see a user who’s interested in lemmy but isn’t really tech savvy, just point them to one of the biggest instances. Don’t explain what federation is, leave it as a feature to be discovered once they’re engaged.
• if you see a user who’s interested in the concept of a fediverse and wants to know how it works, explain federation and send them to a smaller instance.

The way federation works now, it’s still disadvantageous to be on a smaller instance (discoverability of new communities is harder, syncing posts/comments isn’t always fast, it’s hard to know which community is more active. Many of these can be fixed with changes to activitypub and lemmy protocol, but in the meantime, sending casual users to small instances means they’ll likely never return.

So to sum up, I think there should be an avenue for casual users to join the biggest instances, even as we encourage people to move to smaller ones (either targeting those who are more tech savvy, or those who have already been on Lemmy long enough to know how it works - I myself was on Lemmy.world and switched to this “smaller” instance).

Anyway, you’re the admins here and I have no say over what you eventually do. I’m just hoping you’ll consider the practical realities of user behavior - everyone wants what’s best for the fediverse in the long term.